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Religion has been a powerful political force throughout American history. When race enters the mix the results have been some of our greatest triumphs as a nation--and some of our most shameful failures. In this important book, Mark Noll, one of the most influential historians of American religion writing today, traces the explosive political effects of the religious intermingling with race. Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr. In probing such connections, Noll takes readers from the 1830 slave revolt of Nat Turner through Reconstruction and the long Jim Crow era, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to "values" voting in recent presidential elections. He argues that the greatest transformations in American political history, from the Civil War through the civil rights revolution and beyond, constitute an interconnected narrative in which opposing appeals to Biblical truth gave rise to often-contradictory religious and moral complexities. And he shows how this heritage remains alive today in controversies surrounding stem-cell research and abortion as well as civil rights reform. God and Race in American Politics is a panoramic history that reveals the profound role of religion in American political history and in American discourse on race and social justice.

Religion has been a powerful political force throughout American history. When race enters the mix the results have been some of our greatest triumphs as a nation--and some of our most shameful failures. In this important book, Mark Noll, one of the most influential historians of American religion writing today, traces the explosive political effects of the religious intermingling with race. Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow.

Tom Paine, it turns out, may have done almost as much to shape public discourse in the early national period of the United States as he did in moving aggrieved colonists to take up arms against King George III in the Revolutionary period. As historians have documented time and again, the arguments in Paine'sCommon Sense(1776), especially "On Monarchy and Hereditary Succession," worked as an elixir to transform mixed opinions about dealing with Parliamentary overreach into an unalloyed determination to throw off the king. The four books reviewed here point to the same sort of conclusion about the importance of Paine'sThe Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 and then reprinted almost as often over the next few years asCommon Sensehad been at the outset of the War of Independence. With the latter work, however, Paine accomplished more through the opposition he generated than by the readers he convinced. Although a few doughty Loyalists had ventured to take onCommon Sense, that opposition was as nothing compared to the groundswell of denunciation that arose in the 1790s to defuse what Americans of many stripes considered Paine's incendiary provocations. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued monographs from Eric Schlereth, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Sam Haselby provide, in effect, an account of whyThe Age of Reasoncaused such a stir, how those who regarded its arguments as threatening damnation for individuals and poison for the republic mobilized for their own counterpurposes, and then what resulted from the ambiguous success that this mobilization achieved.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)